Articles and Resources

QUOTE: “To single out Muslim-Americans as the source of homegrown terrorism,” (Rabbi Marc Schneier) said, “and not examine all forms of violence motivated by extremist belief — that, my friends, is an injustice.”

QUOTE: The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations say in the suit that the informant, Craig Monteilh, violated members’ civil rights and subjected them to “indiscriminate surveillance” because of their religion.

QUOTE: But according to Fox Sports, which will broadcast the Super Bowl this year, the verse you can see in the stands on television is not suitable for a commercial. The network’s rejection of a 30-second spot centered on John 3:16 is just one example of an advertising culture that can be allergic to expressions of faith.

QUOTE: In her post of July 11, “Veiled Threats?” and her subsequent response to readers, Martha Nussbaum considers the controversy over the legal status of the burqa — which continues to flare across Europe — making a case for freedom of religious expression.

QUOTE: But after objections from the ultra-Orthodox, the bill formally placed authority for conversion in the hands of the chief rabbinate and declared Orthodox Jewish law to be the basis of conversion, making Americans fear that their more lenient conversion processes would be invalidated.

QUOTE: "As near morality as monkeys can make." So the question is, just how near is that? Optimistic Darwinians believe, near enough to be morality. But skeptical Darwinians won’t buy it. The great show we humans make of respect for moral principle they see as a civilized camouflage for an underlying, evolved psychology of a quite different kind.

QUOTE: Ms. Sifton faults Mr. Shapiro’s approach as computer-driven and deprived of historical and theological context. In an interview, she said her father traveled widely in the 1930s, preaching in college chapels and to church groups — especially Y.M.C.A.’s and Y.W.C.A.’s — and could have used the prayer then. She said she fixed the date of its composition to 1943 in her book, “The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War” (W. W. Norton, 2003), because she had relied on her parents’ recollections. Ms. Sifton said the newly unearthed quotations were merely evidence that her father’s spellbinding preaching had had a broad impact. And she said she took greatest umbrage at Mr. Shapiro’s notion that the prayer was so simple that it could have been written by almost anyone in any era.

QUOTE: Lawmakers at the beginning of the year adopted legislation outlawing all forms of what they call “witchcraft,” saying that it was an illegal, parasitical industry that had grown to unacceptable proportions. (In light of that, Arzida and a customer of hers, Nazira, asked to be identified only by their first names.)

QUOTE: They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But their plans, if carried out, could create severe upheaval in the communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches.

QUOTE: Three years after a scandal at the Air Force Academy over the evangelizing of cadets by Christian staff and faculty members, students and staff at West Point and the Naval Academy are complaining that their schools, too, have pushed religion on cadets and midshipmen.

QUOTE: While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored. Last week, two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred by campaign volunteers from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit.

QUOTE: criticized U.S. troops, whom many in the city view as occupiers, for acting like Christian missionaries. He said the coins were part of a pattern of insensitivity toward Muslims, citing the outcry this month over a U.S. sniper in Baghdad who used a Koran, Islam's holiest book, as a target for practice.

QUOTE: Just how far the Roman Catholic Church must go to address the recent sex abuse scandals has—so far—overshadowed Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States...In his speech Benedict told the bishops that "rightly, you attach priority to showing compassion and care to the victims" but stopped short of announcing a new system or changes in canon law that might lead to stricter controls, as some had hoped he would.

QUOTE: "My motivation is in fact about being an honest, true-to-myself Muslim, rather than someone complying with state dictates," says Mr. Naim, a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta since 1999. "I need the state to be neutral about religious doctrine so that I can be the Muslim I choose to be."

QUOTE: Two issues of Muslim practice — whether the call to prayer should ring out across Harvard Yard and whether the university should grant women separate gym hours — have unleashed small waves of controversy over how Harvard practices tolerance.

QUOTE: ...I have no problem with the effort to make church work better for men or challenging men to step up and do something with their lives...[but] I have a big problem with the guy emphasis when it relies on making gay men objects of derision and ridicule.

QUOTE: [A rabbi] who was convicted of fraudulently obtaining more than $4 million, asserts that his ability to pray...has been violated by the Bureau of Prisons’ insistence that he pray in his cell. The cell contains a toilet, making it an unclean place to pray for Jews...

QUOTE: Across the country, child-custody disputes in which religion is the flash point are increasing...for constitutional reasons, judges are reluctant to base their rulings primarily on the religious preferences of parents.

QUOTE: ...evangelical leaders argued that exit polls have ignored “the bipartisan courtship of evangelical voters” and “perpetuated the misperception that all evangelical Christians are Republicans..." This bias in polling questions,” [Howard] Dean said in a letter to the National Election Pool consortium, “has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”

QUOTE: ...a number of churches in the Washington area and elsewhere [have] been forced to use a new playbook to satisfy the NFL, which said that airing games at churches on large-screen TV sets violates the NFL copyright.

QUOTE: Those other churches might argue that such a focus on witchcraft is a relic of Africans’ old beliefs, a dangerously pagan preoccupation. But scholars say this is Christianity made profoundly African. Spiritual Warfare considers itself Pentecostal, and like many other Pentecostals, worshipers see the battle between God and Satan, or what they also call the Bible against witchcraft, shaping the world.

QUOTE: Traditionalists at home and abroad assert that the Bible describes homosexuality as an abomination, and they consider the Episcopal Church’s ordination of Bishop Robinson as the latest and most galling proof of its rejection of biblical authority.

QUOTE: Like many other churches in poor, hardscrabble cities like Trenton, where violence and drugs have shorn whole generations from those that came before them, often with death or incarceration, the New Life Christian Center, where Mr. Granville is the co-pastor, has made outreach one of its missions and its youth ministry a haven for teenagers in a city where the police say nearly half of the 25 murder victims so far this year are under the age of 25.

QUOTE: As a group, blacks attend religious services more frequently than whites and are less supportive of gay rights. In a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll this summer, 43 percent of white Democrats supported same-sex marriage, about double the percentage of black Democrats who said they do. More than half of blacks said they oppose both same-sex marriage and legal recognition of same-sex civil unions.

QUOTE: The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart.

QUOTE: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken Dutch critic of Islam who moved to the United States to escape death threats in the Netherlands, has returned there to fight a Dutch government plan to cut off financing for her bodyguards, her lawyer said Wednesday.

QUOTE: It seems, therefore, that all the things that made Mother Teresa famous—the endless hard toil, the bitter austerity, the ostentatious religious orthodoxy—were only part of an effort to still the misery within.

QUOTE: A bipartisan group of House members is trying to force Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to order an inspector general's investigation into allegations of religious bias and mismanagement at the spiritual ministry department in the nation's largest clinical research hospital.

QUOTE: Pope Benedict XVI restated Tuesday what he said were the “defects” of Christian faiths other than Roman Catholicism, prompting anger from Protestants who questioned the Vatican’s respect for other beliefs.

QUOTE: An international panel appointed by the government of Sri Lanka has issued a stark indictment of a presidential commission impaneled to investigate serious human rights violations, saying that its activities so far “do not satisfy international norms and standards.”

QUOTE: Abortion in this predominantly Catholic country, where the influence of the church has gradually weakened, remains illegal, with the ban on it written into the constitution. Abortions can only be performed if there is a substantial risk to the mother's life, which includes the threat of suicide. The law does not permit abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality.

QUOTE: In light of international uproar in 2005 over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, a comic book about Muslim superheroes is sensitive terrain. The 99 is currently banned in Saudi Arabia, for example, because religious censors allege it attempts to give a face to God – something Islam absolutely prohibits. But al-Mutawa doesn't see The 99 as a comic about Islam so much as a culturally relevant way to inspire youth in a part of the world that doesn't get much positive press.

QUOTE: But the scandal has raised allegations that dogged Uribe when he ran for president -- that he had ties with paramilitary organizations during his years as senator and governor of Antioquia, the country's industrial hub. Those groups, formed by landowners and funded by drug traffickers, eroded support for guerrillas by killing thousands of peasants and leftist politicians in a dirty war that has lasted a generation.

QUOTE: Zimbabwe is marking 27 years of independence from Britain this week – all under Mugabe's rule – but the celebration has been marred by the country's devastated economy and a political crisis sparked by Mugabe's plan to seek another five-year term in 2008. Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, said last week that he would talk with Mugabe's party to try to end the crisis, which he says has resulted in the abduction and torture of 600 political activists this year.

QUOTE: Talk of national identity rarely comes up in public, but privately many people — from academia to venture capital firms — take for granted that the contours of a career in technology are often shaped by the national origin of the technologist.

QUOTE: The book is small, like a diary or personal journal, with a cover that evokes parchment and a brilliant red seal. Just the kind of thing that might hold secrets or treasured thoughts...Yet along with the spiraling sales has come significant criticism for what some say is simply a cleverly repackaged message – and one that is misleading in its claims.

QUOTE: Taking gray wolves off the list would clear the way for legal hunting for the first time since they were eradicated in the West, mainly through deliberate poisoning, in the early 1900s. Idaho wants to reduce its 600 or more wolves by as much as 75%.

QUOTE: Paul R. Hall, 31, allegedly used his position aboard the USS Benfold and his secret clearance to forward details of the battle group's defensive capabilities and how the ships were going to cross the Strait of Hormuz in April 2001. Federal officials wrote in a criminal complaint that Hall -- who is referred to as Hassan Abujihaad throughout the document -- was contacting the Web site to order jihad videos and supported the terrorist mission of attacking American targets such as the USS Cole.

QUOTE: ...a former reading teacher at Hampton Bays Elementary School, said the public school was being run by born-again Christians intent on converting students to “fundamentalist Christianity.” She testified that this religious fervor culminated in her being run out of the school over accusations that she was practicing witchcraft and teaching it to children...[accusing] her of being a witch after she taught fifth graders about the Salem witch trials, exposed them to a children’s book about witches and wizards and introduced them to the weird sisters of “Macbeth.”

QUOTE: In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.

QUOTE: Rooted in evangelical Christianity and supported by more than $1.5 million in public funds, the method of the rehabilitation program is clear enough. A key question is its constitutionality. A trio of appellate judges, including former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, is reviewing a lower court's decision that the program violates the separation of church and state.

QUOTE: There are several reasons for the shift. For one, a global economy is bringing much greater religious diversity to the workplace Everyone wants their beliefs to be accepted, if not equally represented. Add to that the fact that religion is now a public topic, from a president who talks openly about his faith to a proliferation of religious television programming.

QUOTE: The past year saw several cases where clerics were accused of stealing from their faithful. Some churchgoers say the thefts result from putting too much trust in one person and say more oversight is needed to stop it.

QUOTE: De Jesus and his believers say their church -- "Creciendo en Gracia," Spanish for "Growing in grace" -- is misunderstood. Followers of the movement say they have proof that their minister is divine and that their church will one day soon be a major faith in the world.

QUOTE: The American Civil Liberties Union, the People for the American Way Foundation and a partner from a large Manhattan law firm stood beside the student, Matthew LaClair, as he and his family threatened to sue the Kearny Board of Education if their complaints are not resolved. Last fall, Matthew, 16, taped the teacher, David Paszkiewicz, telling students in a history class that if they do not believe that Jesus died for their sins, they “belong in hell.”